I will be supporting this debate, and I hope all the candidates go. I don't think it's bad that we're having this before a general election, and I do believe that the answers should be more substantive than what we've seen.

However, I don't necessarily buy the idea that a science policy debate wouldn't have "winnowed the field". If these questions are important enough to have an entire debate about them (and I believe they are,) then I think they would have been important earlier as well. I know that there are other issues that rest more prominently on the public mind, but I don't think that means that watching a candidate trying to address science policy wouldn't have been influential. In a race where silly things like commercials, rumors and crying seem to be able to sway the public mind substantially, their answers to meatier topics would definitely have had an impact. Everyone likes science (right?) and everyone wants to see it succeed.

If there had been a preliminary debate in which a brave moderator had asked about their views of the current Mars exploration timeline, or about ocean ecology policies, etc, wouldn't there have been some intrigued discussion around the water cooler the next day?

Here's a hypothetical quesiton: what if we get to this debate and all these characters flub it? Would scientific americans, not to mention the people who subscribe to Scientific American, feel short-changed about their choice?

What I'm saying is that I think we underrate the influence these questions would have had, especially in such turbulent fields.